Peres Offers New Peace Plan to Arafat and Sharon

By JAMES BENNET

Published: February 14, 2002

JERUSALEM, Feb. 13 — After months of quiet consultations with a top Palestinian leader, Shimon Peres, Israel's relentless foreign minister, has drawn up a new peace plan. It calls for a cease-fire, immediate recognition of an initial Palestinian state on limited turf and a yearlong negotiation over what the final state would look like.

Now Mr. Peres is starting a solitary quest to sell the plan to his prime minister, who resisted his negotiating in the first place; to his party, which is under new, more hawkish leadership; and to Israelis, most of whom, unlike Mr. Peres, have given up on Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.

"I begin," Mr. Peres acknowledged, "in an air of total skepticism." Indeed, as he discussed the plan today in his office here, Israeli forces were conducting their most aggressive incursion in the Gaza Strip of the 16-month conflict.

What Mr. Peres is beginning, at the age of 78, at what he called the lowest point in Israel's impasse with the Palestinians, is a fresh attempt to grasp the grail he envisioned at the start of the peace talks that led to the Oslo agreement of 1993.

After 55 years in public life — in which he held every senior Israeli office, founded his country's aircraft industry, made Israel a reputed nuclear power and won a Nobel Peace Prize — Mr. Peres has become an object not merely of skepticism but of ridicule.

Leftist Israelis attack him as a dangerous cynic for taking part in the unity government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Rightists attack him as a dangerous dreamer for talking peace with Palestinians.

But he says he has what none of his critics can offer: a plan, an alternative to the worsening violence. Simply advocating it, he believes, will energize the search for a solution by forcing his critics to propose ideas of their own. "This is the weak point of all the skeptics," he said.

With magisterial condescension, he dismissed the ridicule, which he said he had heard in previous forays for peace. "The future always hangs on a minority," he said, "and the past hangs on a majority. Whoever has a new idea is a priori suspected for it. I am not impressed."

Still, associates of Mr. Peres predict that if Mr. Sharon rejects the new initiative, the foreign minister will leave the government. He refused to discuss the issue on the record. But he called the pursuit of a diplomatic solution "my reason for being in the government."

Mr. Peres negotiated the new plan with Ahmed Qurei, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament, who is also known as Abu Ala.

The plan does not spell out a division of Jerusalem or the precise borders of a Palestinian state. Mr. Peres is counting on its ambiguity to make it palatable. "Look, it is based on what Kissinger used to call `constructive ambiguity,' like any compromise," he said. "You know, romances and peace must be done in twilight. You cannot do everything with the full sun."

But it is not certain that most Palestinians have any interest in this twilight romance.

After a cease-fire, Israel under the plan would recognize a Palestinian state in roughly 42 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, land already under Palestinian control. According to the agreement, that is intended to permit negotiations "on an equal standing" while exacting "greater responsibility on the part of the Palestinian leadership."

"They will no longer be able to voice the claim that `the authority is not in our hands,' " he added.

The two sides would then begin negotiating the boundaries of the state, guided by United Nations resolutions on the matter. But Mr. Qurei is seeking a letter from Mr. Peres — or perhaps from the United States or the European Union — explicitly stating that the borders would ultimately conform to those of June 4, 1967, before Israel took the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in a war.

"If the recognition of the Palestinian state will be meaningful, it has to include `on the June 4, 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital,' " said Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator. "And I don't think Shimon will accept this. And the last thing we need now is someone to say, `I know and you know and let's pretend we don't know.' "

But doing away with that pretense would probably doom the plan on the Israeli side, Mr. Peres acknowledged.

At the end of December, when the outlines of the plan Mr. Peres was then still negotiating were leaked, the newspaper Maariv polled Israelis on the basic points, with no mention of 1967. Sixty-one percent said they supported it.

Mr. Peres wants the final agreement to be negotiated ahead of the next Israeli elections, in October 2003. "Otherwise the election will be about personality," he said, "and the subject will be who can bring an end to terror quicker. And for that reason everybody will say: shoot more, act more, I-don't-know-what-to-do-more. And it leads to nowhere."

The very existence of the plan conflicts with a basic position of Mr. Sharon's. The prime minister has repeatedly said he will not negotiate while violence continues. To do so, he fears, would be to reward Palestinians for Israeli lives lost in the 16- month conflict.

But many Palestinians fear that to provide a cease-fire in the absence of negotiations would be to reward Israelis for Palestinian lives lost, with nothing to show for them.